American Appetites Read online

  Bianca said sharply, and with surprising dignity, “That’s the usual bullshit, reducing systems of complex psychological and epistemological thought to some damn old jargon term. Life-affirming, life-negating. I mean, my God.”

  “Bianca,” Ian said, wincing.

  “I mean, it’s just so much more complex than that.”

  “But hardly a reason to be rude.”

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” Bianca said, with a perfunctory glance toward Roberta. “I’m sorry if it came out that way.” She said again, as if someone had challenged her, “It’s all so much more complex than that, that’s all I meant.”

  So they talked at length, but disjointedly, Bianca’s attention focused exclusively on the men, as if poor Roberta did not exist or were invisible. Oriental religion and Western religion: “organized systems of belief,” “sociopolitical-economic transpositions of interior ‘mystical’ states” (to use Denis’s clinical terminology), the immortality of the soul, and of course “reincarnation”—whatever the word meant.

  Denis thought the concept sheerly nonsense, since it was contrary to all scientific evidence; Ian thought it might be interpreted in two ways—as literal or as metaphorical. (“Not metaphorical! Not again!” Bianca said, laughing. “It’s reality we want, Daddy.”) “If literal,” he said, “it is illogical and should be rejected out of hand; if metaphorical, and what is meant is genetic inheritance, with all that that signifies of the will’s curtailed freedom, then it makes a kind of sense. A kind of tragic sense.” He heard, and loathed, his own voice. Who was he, to speak such words, to make such judgments, and in so pontifical and melancholy a tone, as if knowledge heavily weighed upon his shoulders? . . . Seeing his daughter’s disbelieving look he said, “It’s a legitimate way of talking about something so mysterious we can’t in fact talk about it. Something so terrible we can’t in fact . . .” And his voice trailed off, weak, faltering, for he seemed not to know what he meant to say (Ian had of late fallen into his old habit of failing to complete sentences, a mannerism of speech from which Glynnis had presumably weaned him, an infuriating habit, he knew, for it left his listeners waiting expectantly, never quite certain if he meant to continue or if, in fact, he had stopped) “. . . can’t in fact comprehend it. Except as metaphor.”

  Bianca said sharply, “Look, Daddy: ‘reincarnation’ is really beside the point and you know it. What I’m trying to talk about, and what you won’t let me talk about, is the living soul in the dead body in the coffin in the ground.” Her eyes were red-rimmed and quick-darting, her mouth damp; she sat on the edge of one of the heavy wrought-iron chairs Ian had painted white the previous summer, leaning far forward, hands squeezed between her bare knees, bare shoulders hunched. Ian saw belatedly that she was wearing a batik wraparound skirt that had once belonged to Glynnis: orange, green, yellow, brightly tropical in its colors. Her sandaled feet, long, narrow, bare, white, were set flat upon the flagstones with a look of enormous tension.

  Ian began to protest, “The living soul in—?” but Bianca cut him off, in an ironic voice, as if conceding a point.

  “Of course she was embalmed, wasn’t she, that’s what you are all thinking. That makes it all clean, blank, neutral, final. So sanitary,” she said. She looked at him like a bright, arrogant student finally confronting her teacher: playing a bit to the audience. “I mean, it couldn’t be the case, if she died—I mean of course she did die, but I mean it couldn’t be the case that she is somehow still alive, in that Bardo state. Suffering nightmares and hallucinations, remnants of her past life, or some sort of collective unconscious of the past—that kind of thing.” She paused, staring at Ian. “It couldn’t be the case, except: what if it is?”

  Ian said, “What are you talking about, Bianca? Of course Glynnis was embalmed. The body was embalmed.”

  “‘The body’! ‘The remains’!” Bianca said contemptuously. “You think it’s finished then, don’t you. People like you. All so fucking sanitary.” She looked from Ian to Denis, Denis to Ian, her eyes widened in derision. “You think it’s over.”

  “Bianca, honey—”

  “Bianca, shit.”

  Then, with no transition, Bianca was talking about the past, past centuries, when people in comas were surely buried alive, the kind of comas in which breathing and heartbeat can’t be detected and skin temperature is low: Lazarus, for instance; Lazarus is the obvious example, Lazarus raised from the dead. . . . “Just think of what it would be like,” she said, shivering, “to wake up and find yourself buried. How you’d scream for help, and push at the coffin lid, and scratch and claw at it, how horrible! You would know immediately what had happened, where you were. You would know that people you trusted had abandoned you. It must have happened all the time. . . .”

  Roberta was shaking her head, and Denis murmured, “Surely not all the time,” but Ian, transfixed by his daughter’s words, sat silent; knowing what would come next—such lucidity, and madness.

  “What if Mommy is in that situation? Right now? Buried alive? And there’s only us to save her? Like, she wasn’t really dead in the hospital, but the machines couldn’t detect life. The soul shrunk to something small, like a pea. In hiding. In a kind of shock.” She paused and smiled. “At the same time, I know it’s crazy to think this way. It’s hopeless. Because for one thing she’d have suffocated by now—they all must have suffocated fairly soon, people buried alive—and also there’s the—what was it, the other thing?—embalming. Embalmed.” She smiled again and shook her head vigorously, as if to clear it. “The fact, of course, that she was embalmed.”

  These words of acquiescence did not signify a conclusion, only a sort of end stop. Ian thought, She does not know what she is saying or even what she means to say.

  Though it was not yet fully dark, fireflies had begun to appear in the shadows of the McCulloughs’ backyard. Stray, wayward, isolated, as if improvised: tiny pinpricks of light, like pulse beats, or the beating of one’s thoughts. To what purpose, Ian wondered, other than the self’s stubborn assertion: I am here, if only for an instant; I am here, if so shortly gone. The first sighting of fireflies in the early summer, like the first sighting of red-winged blackbirds in the early spring, had never failed to give Glynnis pleasure. Look, Glynnis would say, and Ian would look, and say, Yes? What?—ah, fireflies!

  Now Roberta said, “Look at the fireflies,” and they all looked, even Bianca, and took pleasure in the moment; or seemed to.

  Denis said, “At our house, last year, they were really quite remarkable—one night I had to get out of bed to look out the window, it had seemed the night was luminescent, I’d been afraid it was some sort of cataclysm in the sky; do you remember that, Roberta?”

  Roberta laughed and said, “No, I think that was starlight, Denis. That night. Not fireflies.”

  “I’m sure it was fireflies,” Denis said.

  “Starlight, Denis.”

  “You know how you’re half asleep and half awake and your thinking is both muddled and logical? I remember thinking, What if it’s the end of the world? And I have so much work to do tomorrow.”

  They laughed, even Bianca laughed, and Roberta said, “But I’m afraid it was starlight, not fireflies.”

  Ian was thinking, Glynnis must be dead, because she isn’t here. If she were not dead she would be here.

  Bianca said good night and left the adults on the terrace, as night came on. Damp, fragrance, fireflies, night. What would they say of Bianca? What could be said? Denis murmured a few words, and Roberta murmured a few words: commiseration, consolation, the usual, meaning only to give comfort; and, yes, to some small degree they did give comfort, for which Ian was grateful. He said clumsily, “Well—it’s hard,” as if he had not said these words not long before to the same people. “It’s all so new and raw to her—”

  Though Ian understood that his friends were eager to go home, he heard himself ask nonetheless, in a perfectly casual, shameless voice, would they join him in another drink?—for
he certainly intended to have one.

  And how, being his and Glynnis’s closest friends, could they refuse?

  THAT NIGHT, IAN believed he heard Bianca crying in her room. He had not been sleeping, yet the sound, dim, vague, muffled, had roused him from sleep.

  Without switching on the hall light he went to her door and touched the knob, but did not turn it, remembering that his daughter was a young woman now, and not his child: or not his child only. He rapped gently on the door instead. “Bianca? Are you all right, honey?”

  There was silence, perhaps abashed silence; then words Ian couldn’t distinguish. He opened the door an inch or so but did not look in. (A dim light was burning. Bianca must have been reading in bed.) “Are you all right, honey? I thought I heard a sound.”

  “Yes, Father. Of course.”

  He stood indecisive, as if rebuffed. The word “Father” struck an odd formal note. “I was just wondering,” he said. “Good night, then.”

  Still he lingered, his heart beating hard. Had he been asleep? Imagining himself, these nights, sleepless? Woken with rude abruptness yet unable to recall being woken, dazed as if by a purely physical blow. . . . He swallowed; his mouth was dry, parched dry, the consequence of too much alcohol that night, several drinks after Roberta and Denis had finally managed to slip away. (“I must fix Ronnie’s supper,” Roberta said, apologetic, embarrassed. “Ronnie will be wondering where we are.”) And now in his cotton pajamas, barefoot, leaning his head against the door of his daughter’s room, politely rebuffed, yet not quite comprehending. What day was this, what year? Glynnis’s death might not yet have happened.

  Bianca said, raising her voice, “Good night, Father,” but added, “I guess I’ll be going back to school soon.”

  “Yes? How soon?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “If I can get an afternoon flight.”

  Ian nodded, though Bianca could not see him. He murmured good night another time and returned to his room, thinking, It is impossible to imagine our lives without Glynnis between us.

  3.

  Roberta Grinnell telephoned, to ask if she might drop by. She had some plates of Glynnis’s to return, she said—“I forgot to bring them over the other evening”—and something she felt she must tell Ian.

  Couldn’t she tell him over the phone? he asked.

  It might be better, she said, if she told him in person.

  “Yes,” Ian said quietly. “I see.” He understood that Roberta would be bringing him bad news, even as he understood that no news, however bad, could make the slightest difference to him now.

  So Roberta Grinnell came to Ian McCullough, surreptitiously, he guessed, without having told Denis, or anyone, uneasy and self-conscious in his presence, as if fearful of him, or of being alone in the house with him—for which, after all, he could not reasonably blame her. In the more than fifteen years of their acquaintance they had never been so explicitly alone together as this.

  And in a house, Ian thought, from which his own wife was absent.

  Roberta had brought him not only the borrowed plates but an enormous seafood casserole, which Ian did not doubt would feed him for days. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re all so kind.” (And they were: since Glynnis’s death, a number of women friends had brought him food, primarily casseroles; Roberta herself had prepared several meals.) She said, smiling, nervous, “I can’t imagine why I forgot these plates when we came over the other evening; I seem to be forgetting so much these days. . . . The irony is, because of Glynnis, I called off the party: postponed it indefinitely. It was to be for some economists and their wives, a dinner Denis has been wanting us to do for some time, we owe so many people, I mean people like that . . . professional colleagues, mainly . . . nice enough but not really friends. I don’t even want to think about it now. And Denis too, Denis has said . . .”

  Ian, bemused, lifted one of the plates out of the Neiman-Marcus box and weighed it in his hand. It was about the size of a salad plate, milky white, with a border of purple and lacy green, and two shallow circles, the larger in the center, the smaller, and deeper, near the rim. “These are beautiful pieces of china,” he said, “but what are they? I could swear I’ve never seen them before.”

  “Artichoke plates,” Roberta said.

  “What kind of plates?”

  “Artichoke.”

  Ian laughed and set the plate carefully back in the box. He felt, for the moment, really quite light-headed. What a world: artichoke plates! A set of twelve! And his dead wife’s friend was dutifully returning them without having had the opportunity to use them.

  Roberta laughed too, as if in embarrassment. “Yes, Glynnis is the only one of us, was the only one, who would have had a set of anything so . . . specialized. This indentation is for the artichoke, see, and this is for the dressing. It’s really quite ingenious.” She paused, looked up at Ian as if in appeal. There was, between them, even now, that air of light, quicksilver, rather insistent banter cultivated at social gatherings in Hazelton-on-Hudson: a heightening of the rhythms and cadences of ordinary speech itself. “I’m sure you’ve eaten off these plates, Ian, even if you don’t remember.”

  “I have never liked artichokes,” Ian said.

  “Denis has trouble eating them too.”

  “I have never liked them.”

  Ian shut the top of the box, as if he could not bear to look inside, and carried it to a high shelf in one of the cupboards.

  Before Roberta’s arrival he had been sitting at the kitchen table, not so much sorting through old snapshots as simply looking through them, seeking his wife’s shifting image amid the daunting, ill-organized accumulation of years; we must sit down one day and put these things in order, Glynnis had warned, before it becomes impossible. But they had not, of course, and now the task was impossible: hundreds of loose snapshots, formal photographs, newspaper clippings (badly yellowed, curled, torn) . . . the mementos of nearly three decades. Glynnis had filed everything away in manila envelopes crammed into boxes and stored in a closet of the guest room.

  “Ah! I see what you’re doing,” Roberta said. When Ian made no reply but stood stiffly aside, clearly not wanting her to look at the snapshots, she said, as if apologetically, “I was the same way . . . my mother, my sisters, and I . . . after my father’s death. Looking through photograph albums for hours. . . .”

  Ian said, though it was hardly true, “I’m trying to put things in order.”

  “It’s amazing how important pictures are, after a death. Any pictures. At any age. How precious. . . .”

  “Yes,” Ian said, wanting to change the subject. “Shall we sit in the other room? Would you like a drink?”

  Roberta did not want a drink, not even a glass of chilled white wine, for it was early in the day, not yet three o’clock; but, being Roberta, sensitive as she was to others’ feelings, whether these feelings were articulated or not, or consciously acknowledged or not, she naturally acquiesced—“But only one.”

  Ian said, as if reprimanded, “Only one.”

  He led her into the living room, thinking, as he so frequently thought, of late, that this more public part of their house was ill-suited for mourning: flooded with sunshine as it was and so beautifully furnished, in Glynnis’s impeccable taste. The sun, through the glass walls, had the effect of a subtle magnification, or intensification, of color, texture, weight; there were, seemingly, no shadows, no interstices for thought, recollection, grief, to take substantial root. There were stacks of glossy magazines on the tables, Art & Antiques, Country Life, House & Garden; there were hardcover and paperback books, most of them in bright, stylish jackets; wall hangings in colorful fabrics; potted rubber plants; the dwarf orange tree a friend had given Glynnis, which had to be nursed with a good deal of care, that it might, as it now did, yield oranges tiny and perfect as ornaments. Ian felt an impulse to apologize but in the act of beginning to speak could not remember what he meant to say.

 
Roberta was admiring, as she’d admired, a thousand times, what she called the house’s unique architecture—“Vaughn says it’s Korean-inspired; it is exotic”—and the landscape beyond the windows, a wooded area, dense with foliage and partly wild, inherited, in its complex if almost overpowering beauty, from the house’s previous owners, who had spent thousands of dollars on trees, shrubs, plantings. And there was Glynnis’s little rose garden, in the courtyard. “The peach-colored, with the white, that sort of watercolorlike rose . . . those are my favorites. Do you know what they are?”

  Ian stared blankly. “Are—?”

  “What they’re called,” Roberta said. “Is it Double Delight?”

  But Ian didn’t know, of course. He was very tired suddenly.

  So he sat down, not really wanting to sit down, for he knew his fatigue would deepen if he sat, but it seemed that Roberta Grinnell, his guest, was sitting down, despite his rudeness in failing to invite her, and the floor tilted precariously, and he was trying to think why this woman was here, in his living room with him, at midday: this friend, this wife of a friend, someone to whom he was obliged to speak, to smile, to be gracious, charming, kind, hospitable; why Glynnis was not here to happily shift the burden of conversation from him to herself, as he’d always depended upon her to do; ah, he was desperate for her to do!

  He shut his eyes, but only for an instant. He opened them, and saw Roberta looking at him with an unreadable expression—pity? sympathy? apprehension? alarm?—as if from a great distance. She wore a white jersey blouse that fitted her loosely, and a denim skirt; she was bare-legged, in sandals: a small-boned, slender woman, dark-haired, graying, yet with a strand of dark gold at her left temple, a look of stray and unintended beauty. Her eyes were a pale, washed blue, set wide in her rather small face; her skin was still smooth, and relatively unlined, with a fragrance (but was Ian remembering now, or pointedly dreaming?) like almonds. His dear friend’s wife. His friend’s dear wife. Why, Ian wondered, had he not looked at her in so long . . . it must have been years. . . .